How's This for a Pitch?

"Here's the plan! We get to the Moon, see? And then we make a handful of visits, right?"

"Yeah. And then what? We build bases? Research stations? Colonies, even?"

"No. Then we never come back. Not ever."

"And then we never come back. Not ever! That's the ticket! Yeh."

Spacey Pipe Dreams.

I see once again news of the fact that the entire surface of Mars is not just dry, not only only barren, not merely bombarded with radiation, but also completely and utterly poisonous to life.

Enough with the fantasies and insanity that humans will go out into space and to alien worlds to live.

Colonization of other planets and points in deep space are nice ideas, but that's all they are. Getting there and creating a living environment is prohibitively expensive now and always will be. You cannot reduce the toxicity of a planet's entire surface. Humans did not evolve to live in zero G or even low G environments. We would die in either. The litany of dangers to colonizing space and planets with environments completely inimical to life is a sad pipe dream fit only for fiction. All very nice, but it ain't gonna happen. Not now. Not fifty years from now. Not ever.

We can't even stop ourselves from poisoning the planet that gave birth to us. How are we supposed to make a home out of locations that want only to destroy not just us, but Life itself? We aren't supposed to, and we can't do so.

What we need to do is forget about our greed, collectively reduce the human population in a sane manner, and stop consuming the planet that is the only place in the Universe where we are safe and relatively secure.

We're not going anywhere. Humans haven't even been beyond low Earth orbit in many decades; and we aren't going anywhere like that ever again. It's not just that it's too expensive, it's also that the world's collective wealth has been transferred from governments to individuals; and those richies ain't going to give any of it up.

So stop sucking on that pipe filled with opium dreams.

Mars. A dead planet. Dead in every way. You can't fix it. You can't live on it. Forget about it. It ain't gonna happen.

The Wild Blue Yonder

I plan on watching this film tonight. I've always liked Brad Dourif, and Werner Herzog's films are generally at least interesting (if often confusing). I'll let you know what I think.

I do like this clip for the sense of improbability it conveys toward the idea of interstellar travel. Frankly, using anything even remotely tied to our current technologies, humans are not likely to venture into deep space at all; much less interstellar space.

Brad Dourif, from the Werner Herzog film The Wild Blue Yonder.

The improbability of interstellar travel by humans.

Reality Sent Wernher Von Braun to Bed Without His Dreams

I love science fiction as much as the next nerd. However, most people take that stuff much too seriously. They think it's all going to come to pass--interstellar travel, terraforming other planets, encountering alien civilizations, and other such fantasies.

Worst of all of those fantasies are the ones wherein people think we'll find another Earth-like planet.

The odds of finding a planet where we can breathe the atmosphere and not get blasted to smithereens by radiation are...hmm...let's see: ZERO!

It ain't happening. It's a fantasy and a pipe dream.

What are the ingredients. The Goldilocks zone around a sun pretty much exactly the same mass, age, and activity as Sol. A planet not only approximately the exact same mass as Earth, but with the precise chemical and elemental makeup with active tectonics and vast systems of oceans and rivers of H2O at the triple-point of water. A planet that has a HUGE moon so large that what you're looking at is a double-planet system--said "moon" helping to keep the main planet's core heated and the magnetic shield in action. Which means, a planet that was smashed at some point earlier in its life by a Mars-sized body that it absorbed, kicking off a Moon-sized portion of the impactor into orbit so that the duo would form said double-planet system.

Yeah...we're going to find exactly that somewhere in the galaxy where we can travel in our faster--than-light vehicles. LOL!

Go watch a Stark Trek show, my fellow geeky mooks.

Yeah....We're going to find this concoction.

Reality slapped Von Braun in the face and sent him to oblivion with the realization that it will never happen.

Da Moon

Last night I took the camera and tripod out in the back yard and played around with taking photographs of the Moon. Some of them came out OK. I really need to look in to buying a better telephoto lens or perhaps a decent telescope with an adapter that I can use with my Canon camera.

At any rate, I do seem to be slowly learning how to use the camera a bit better as the weeks progress.

Messing around with the camera-tripod combination reminded me a lot of my days being fascinated by the Moon and what I thought was the coming Space Age when I was a kid. I really did think that I'd live to see routine flights into Earth orbit and that people would live on the Moon and that we'd have outposts on Mars. Alas, the billionaire elite fucked us all and stole our National wealth.

I tried various ISO and F stop settings. I did manage to capture a few decent images.

These were the two best.